HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, by Amy Larocca

Oh, the irony of cracking open “How to Be Well” while on vacation in Italy. There, on an island off the coast of Naples, a breakfast buffet included three varieties of tiramisu. Wine was poured not to a stingy fingertip’s depth but from a bottomless carafe — at lunchtime, no less. And when stores closed in observance of an afternoon siesta, the only people on the streets were American tourists, jogging. (I was on the prowl for a postage stamp because, yes, I still send postcards.)

It was from this place of abundance and balance that I followed Amy Larocca, a veteran journalist, into the hellscape of stringent food plans, cultish exercise routines and medical quackery that have, over the past decade or so, constituted healthy living in some of the wealthiest enclaves of the United States. Blame social media, political turmoil or the pandemic — no matter how you slice it, the view is dispiriting. But Larocca’s tour is a lively one, full of information and humor.

The book begins with a colonic, “the flossing of the wellness world,” Larocca writes. We find the author herself on an exam table, “white-knuckled and curled up like a baby shrimp, naked from the waist down.” She recalls her doctor’s disapproval of the procedure — a sort of power washing of the colon — and its risks, including rectal perforation, juxtaposed with one woman’s claim that a colonic made her feel like she could fly, like it was “rinsing out the corners of her psyche.”

Where did we get the idea that the body — specifically a woman’s body — is unclean inside? A problem to be solved? And how did the concept of wellness bloom “like a rash,” Larocca writes, into a $5.6 trillion global industry?

These are the questions she seeks to answer, using data, history, medicine, pop culture and her own experience. She parses fads and trends, clean beauty and athleisure wear, the gospel of SoulCycle and the world according to Goop. She weighs the advantages and disadvantages of micro-dosing and biohacking. She too goes to Italy, where she attends a Global Wellness Summit featuring a spandex and sneaker fashion show and a presentation on ending preventable chronic disease the world over.

At times, Larocca seems to approach her own subject with the same sweep. The second half of “How to Be Well” reads like a survey course, cramming the industry’s relationship to politics, men and the environment into single chapters when each could fill a whole semester. As for why meditation merits more real estate than vaccines, I can only assume that the book was already at the printer when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as health secretary.

But when Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence and sex positivity, she’s at her best — authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy.

She debunks the cockamamie but persistent notion that “feeling old is not an inevitable byproduct of aging but something easily avoided by paying attention.” (And by forking over gobs of cash; more on this shortly.) After attending an Oprah-sponsored conference on menopause, a subject Larocca has covered for The New York Times, she realizes that “aging is different from disease” and “isn’t necessarily something to be cured,” let alone through “neat, tidy, attainable solutions.”

Then there’s the sneaky rebranding of old-school dieting for “detoxification,” another wolf in sheep’s clothing. Think fasting, juicing, abstaining from all manner of verboten foods. Even if the professed endgame is “glow,” Larocca makes clear, “part of the promise is still, always, to rid us of a bit of ourselves.”

And finally, refreshingly, she’s honest about the money at stake for the wellness-industrial complex — not just for stylists turned wellness coaches or models turned nutritionists, but for massive corporations cashing in on an age of worry.

“None of these institutions is nonprofit; none of these institutions is altruistic at its core,” Larocca writes, in a passage reminiscent of Carol Channing’s monologue from “Free to Be You and Me,” in which she reminded us that happy people doing housework on TV tend to be paid actors.

“It is their job to persuade me to come back,” Larocca continues, “to spend more money on what they’ve got to give, to serve their investors, to serve themselves.”

And that, as “How to Be Well” wisely shows us, is the bottom line.

HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time | By Amy Larocca | Knopf | 291 pp. | $28

By Jeffery Deaver

Colter Shaw is a professional “rewards seeker,” a skilled tracker who specializes in finding missing people — usually for the reward money, though sometimes out of the goodness of his heart. It’s a simple enough vocation and yet, as the suspense veteran Deaver has demonstrated in four prior Shaw novels (and the TV adaptation “Tracker”), the ways in which Shaw finds peril — or peril finds him — keep multiplying. In SOUTH OF NOWHERE (Putnam, 403 pp., $30), his sister Dorion implores him to help to locate potential survivors after a levee collapses in a small Northern California town.

From here, Deaver is off to the proverbial races. Does every chapter have a twist? Pretty much. Is Colter just likable enough to brush off needless conflict and still find time for romance? Definitely. Is the writing a little too reminiscent of detailed outlines like the ones Deaver is known to fashion before writing a first draft? You bet. Could I put the book down? Not a chance.

The Colter Shaw series prioritizes action and the constant possibility of calamity, leaving only the barest amount of room for character development, like Colter’s continued grappling with the effects of his survivalist upbringing. The books don’t measure up to the best of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels, but they all accomplish their mission: thrilling engagement.

by Uzma Jalaluddin

Kausar Khan, introduced in DETECTIVE AUNTY (Harper Perennial, 326 pp., paperback, $17.99), has spent the past 20 years relishing the stability of placid North Bay, where she and her husband moved after fleeing busy, bustling Toronto in the wake of a family tragedy.

But then her husband dies shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her daughter, Sana, calls with upsetting news: “I’m in trouble. There’s been a murder, and I’m the prime suspect.” It seems Sana’s landlord has been found inside her clothing store with a dagger in his chest. Kausar returns to Toronto’s Golden Crescent neighborhood as both a concerned mother and a tenacious amateur sleuth.

The case against Sana is strong, but as Kausar discovers, the murder victim had many enemies. If only the ghosts of Kausar’s past would stop haunting her present-day investigation!

Jalaluddin, who has crossed into crime fiction from the romantic comedy genre, doesn’t skimp on plotting — the whodunit twist caught me pleasingly flat-footed — but shines most with character and community, showing the complexities of mother-daughter relationships and the variability of longtime friendships. “Detective Aunty” is the first in a new series and I certainly welcome more installments.

by Michael McGarrity

Reading Michael McGarrity’s noir novel NIGHT IN THE CITY (Norton, 263 pp., $28.99), about the midcentury death of a Manhattan socialite named Laura Neilson, I found it difficult to avoid thinking about Vera Caspary’s 1943 classic suspense novel “Laura” (and the equally classic film adaptation featuring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews). While I wished for more structural innovation along the lines of what Caspary accomplished, I did enjoy McGarrity’s more conventional narrative here: A man finds his ex-lover murdered and must clear his name, rooting out widespread corruption as the atmosphere thickens.

The man is the assistant district attorney Sam Monroe, who dated Laura for a time and never really got over the way she broke up with him by bringing a new flame to the local bar that was “their private haunt and rendezvous.” So when she summons him to her Manhattan penthouse, off Sam goes, waved in by an expectant doorman — only to find her body, his Army dog tags wrapped around her neck. One thing is clear: He’s been set up. With the help of an intrepid private eye and his former lover’s diary, Sam sets out to find her killer.

McGarrity paints a seedy portrait of a bygone New York that pulses with life, lust and larceny.

by Leonie Swann; translated by Amy Bojang

Finally, it gives me great pleasure that Swann’s exceedingly delightful Sheep Detective books are once again available for American audiences. “Three Bags Full,” first published in 2005 and reissued in February, introduced an intrepid flock on the case of who had killed their beloved shepherd. In BIG BAD WOOL (Soho Crime, 384 pp., $28.95), the sheep — including Zora, “a Blackface sheep with a weakness for the abyss,” Ramesses, a “nervous young ram full of good ideas,” and Miss Maple, “the cleverest sheep in the flock and maybe even the world” — return with a new minder, Rebecca.

They’re wintering next to a French château, which sounds idyllic, but the disappearance of other sheep, the mounting deaths of deer and, eventually, a human, strike fear in the hearts of the flock, who are worried they or their shepherd may be next. Is it a werewolf, the shape-shifting creature called Garou, as the local goats seem to believe? Or a more prosaic yet sinister culprit? How the sheep discover the truth will enchant readers who pay close attention.